Alaska is home to 16 national wildlife refuges and their programs have been hampered by Trump administration staffing cuts in the last eight months. At the refuge in Kodiak, unpaid volunteers are temporarily stepping in to keep its visitor center from shuttering during the last hurrah of the island’s cruise ship season.
Poppy Benson is the VP for outreach of Friends of Alaska National Wildlife Refuges. This nonprofit, volunteer-run organization, supports all of the refuges in the state through small grants, volunteering and advocacy.
“One of the things is we are dealing with [Sen. Lisa] Murkowski’s office. We’re sending her letters. We’ve had meetings with her to just explain how understaffed the refuges are and how bad these budget cuts are," Benson said.
So bad that Benson and a couple other volunteers from the nonprofit paid their own way to come to Kodiak on the Tustumena ferry this week. For the next two weeks, they’ll staff the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center without pay. Benson said she and others from the Friends of Alaska National Wildlife Refuges have also been asked to volunteer at the Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge outside of Tok.
Benson said without volunteers, the current staff at the refuge in Kodiak wouldn’t be able to keep the visitor center open during this busier part of the island’s cruise ship season. Six more ships are scheduled to call by the end of the month, bringing up to 6,000 passengers.
“They’re trying to keep it together with some events, but the outreach staff is now two people, where it had been four," Benson said. "And they don’t have the interns they had, they don’t have the seasonals. They couldn’t hire any of the seasonals this year that they had in the past, which was as many as four. So the staff doing public events has just been cut in half.”
The visitor center was also closed this past winter due to a lack of staffing. Historically, it’s only been closed intermittently between seasons.
Currently the Kodiak refuge has eight staff members, with one being a uniquely shared position between the regional Native corporation Koniag and the refuge, the Community Affairs Liaison Amy Peterson. Before this year, the local refuge had 14 staff including a bird biologist, a fisheries biologist and a pilot.
Similar scenarios are playing out in other refuges across the state. In Yukon Flats, the third largest wildlife refuge in the country with over 11 million acres of land, there is no longer a manager or deputy manager on staff. Jimmy Fox was the former Refuge Manager until this summer.
The maintenance mechanic at the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, near Cold Bay in the Aleutians, was cut earlier this year, leaving just three staff at that refuge and a federal wildlife officer based out of King Salmon. According to Benson, only six of the state’s 16 refuges currently have managers.
She added that some of the refuges in the state, including Kodiak which is being run by a deputy manager, the federal government has sent employees from outside of Alaska to work for 45-days at refuges within the state.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service oversees the National Wildlife Refuges. The service declined an interview request for this story. In an email, a spokesperson said the service remains dedicated to its conservation mission, but it has a policy not to discuss personnel matters – despite collaborating with Koniag and the friends of the refuges group for staffing at the Kodiak refuge.
The full emailed said, “the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service remains dedicated to conserving America’s wildlife and natural habitats while promoting access, use, and enjoyment of public lands by the American people, all while upholding federal responsibilities with efficiency and accountability. As a matter of policy, we do not comment on personnel matters.”
Benson said these staffing changes are mainly due to federal budget cuts and the turmoil after the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency started canceling federal contracts and forcing out employees at the beginning of the year.
“The Fish and Wildlife Service refuge system in the state has lost 37 employees through, since the start of the administration. And they only had 220 to begin with," she said.
On top of the recent staffing changes, the federal funding for national wildlife refuges has been declining or flat since fiscal year 2015. That’s according to data from Congress’ nonpartisan research service.
The Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center will be open on cruise ship days from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. through the end of the month. Cruise ships are scheduled to arrive into Kodiak on Sept. 19, Sept. 20, two on Sept. 23, Sept. 25 and Sept. 27.
